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Keith Humphreys poses a real-life question:

Here is my colleague’s not-as-simple-as-all-that dilemma. He has pilot data showing that a cheap, generic drug has a potentially life saving medical application. He now has a grant from the NIH (i.e., not industry) to study it in a major trial. A for-profit company has a copycat version of the generic drug that is virtually the same but is still on patent and is thus highly expensive. The question is whether he should study the generic version or the proprietary one.

If the experiment proves that the generic version of the drug is effective, he will get a very nice paper in a medical journal. And that will be the end of it. We have a million studies showing that clinical practice is minimally influenced by journal articles alone. In contrast, if he studies the proprietary drug, a profit making company will send out their armies of marketers to physicians and get many of them to use it, making a great deal of money for themselves in the process…but this will also save lives, because aggressive marketing and promotion such as the industry does has been proven to affect clinical practice dramatically.

Italics mine. So what should he do?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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